penny for your thoughts
by BerryliciousCheerio
Summary: and a bullet for your dreams. #14 in bay-verse. highly recommended that you read the preceding stories. high T


**disclaimed**

* * *

The reunion is televised, of course, because the goodbyes weren't, and this, a Capitol official explains, may be the only way to stave off rebellion. They sit in their car on the train, not daring to look out the windows for fear of what they might see, but their escort taps her on the shoulder and whispers, "She's there."

And that's about all it takes to break their shields, the mighty wall that they'd built during the Games comes tumbling down and then they're fighting each other for the window.

As the train pulls into the station, they are not fazed by the masses of people, of fans, of reporters, are not interested in the slightest at the people screaming their names, but are enraptured with the little girl that is grinning at them, her hair tied back into pigtails with ribbons, eyes wide and happy. Clove sags against Cato, whatever leftover adrenalin departing in a rush, and she states quietly, "She's grown."

He nods; wraps his arms around her in a rare form of affection that is saved for moments of quiet, and they wait.

**...**

Bay wraps her arms around her mother's neck the first moment she can, and refuses to let go, as if she worries that she'll leave again (which, Clove thinks, isn't that small of a possibility), and Clove's not quite sure she'd be willing to let her go, anyway.

Cato has his hand on her shoulder, his other hand on Bay's back, and he leans in close to smile the best he can at her, but it's hard to face his daughter when not three days ago, he slaughtered a girl that just wanted to go home to her sister. He thinks he can relate, in some ways. But that does not make him any less of a monster, and he hopes that Bay will never think less of him because of it.

The little family is swarmed by cameras and reporters, as expected, and Clove shields her daughter's eyes from the flashes, wishes that she could get out of there faster. Cato scowls at the microphones that are thrust in their path, and slowly the din quiets and they're able to make their way out, the crowds parting for them like the red sea.

Neither are quite sure as to which house they'll stay at, until Victor's Village, but Clove thinks Cato's leaning towards her house, to avoid his mother for a little, and it's not like she has anyone to see or anything, not outside the squirming infant in her arms, so she'll go where he goes. Besides, her house has most of Bay's things there, anyway.

There's a car waiting for them when they get out into the plaza, and its windows are mercifully tinted, and it's blissfully quiet when they slide in. Bay settles between her parents, content with their presence and with the ability to play with her mother's hair.

It's been a while since she's worn it down, Clove realizes. It's also been a while since there hasn't been blood under her nails, some dark part of her mind adds bitterly. She suddenly doesn't want Bay anywhere near her, not when she can still see those faces in the night sky, can still hear their screams.

She shoves her daughter towards Cato, who seems to anticipate it, his arms open and waiting, and she curls towards the window.

**...**

Sometimes, when Clove's asleep on her side of their bed, and Bay's heavy breathing is detectable from across the hall, through their open doors, Cato sees things. He sees the mutts, their jaws _this _close to his face, and he sees the body of the girl from Eleven, carved by Clove's impeccable knives, and he sees Rue, the little girl that sang like a bird and died like one too, who could have been Bay in a few years, and it all sort of rushes back, and he climbs out of bed carefully, and pads down to the basement.

Their house in the Village is big, and the walk to the basement is long enough for him to clear his head. They keep all their Games memorabilia stashed down here, out of the way of Bay's prying fingers and learning eyes.

He's not sure what they'll do when she gets old enough to ask questions about _it_, and he tries not to think about it, or the fact that one day their daughter will be old enough to die like that, or worse yet, live like they do now, with days filled up with tense silence and nights filled with nightmares and people that aren't alive anymore.

He and Clove haven't touched each other more than necessary since they got back, haven't even kissed, save for publicity. He's started looking forward to such events, to get to feel her skin under his fingers, to feel her lips against his, to feel her steady heartbeat against his chest as they pose together, embracing.

They haven't really spoken to each other either, he realizes, staring at the bare wall. Nothing unless it's small talk or related to Bay.

God, and Bay, he thinks, will be the only thing to save them. She hasn't realized her parents are different at all, just that they're there, and that they want to play with her all the time and hold her close.

Every once in a while, when he walks into the living room when Clove thinks she's alone, he'll see her holding Bay and looking at her like she wished she could fit her back into her belly and keep her safe there forever, now that they've seen what waits for her later.

It's all a bit overwhelming for a seventeen year old father, who forgot his mother's birthday last week, and has an inexplicable urge to not wake up in the mornings.

**...**

It's four months until the ice breaks.

Bay's over at her grandmother's house, because Cato and Clove have an interview scheduled, but the newspaper called to cancel, and they're just sitting on opposite ends of the couch, not looking at each other, suddenly struck with just how empty their house really is without their daughter, when Clove turns her head to say something, and there's something in the curve of her cheek, in the tilt of her head, in the red of her pursed lips, and Cato can't really stop himself.

Clove suddenly finds herself being kissed rather ferociously, and responds in kind, and Cato thinks that maybe this is their first step back to normal.

**...**

Their first time after the Games is rough and painful and neither care much for gentleness anyway, but the bruises and marks they leave on one another are rather ridiculous, Clove thinks. It's nice though. She gets a taste of what they used to be; before Bay and before strings tied around their fingers and before the Games and murder.

When all that really mattered was the next time they could find an empty closet or room somewhere, when they could rip at each other's clothes with abandon, and wear their marks like badges of honor.

She feels like she thinks a girl her age should feel, giddy and tired and happy and broken all at once, and she thinks that maybe she might be able to look at Bay for longer than a minute now, and maybe she and Cato might actually speak to each other again, and for a minute she deludes herself into thinking that everything will be okay, but then she remembers that they're monsters when their daughter is an angel, and that never really works out right, does it?

**...**

Little angel girls with monsters for parents rarely turn out okay.

**..**

They ought to know this by now.

**...**

Things get better, for a while. Bay doesn't ask questions, and they don't give answers, and she learns to run rather than walk, and they spend a good four years running after her constantly, dragging her away from the street when she wanders too close, and blocking her path when she wants something that she can't have.

Her first day of school is terrifying and exhilarating and _damn_, they've raised this well-behaved little girl, who, by all appearances, is the same as her classmates, sweet and bubbly and as of yet untainted by the world.

Bay comes home, babbling excitedly about all the new friends she's made, and about how there's going to be a competition the next day, and she stumbles over the word _Career_, because she still can't pronounce her _r_'s well, but her parents freeze and stare at each other over her dark curls.

She's shown no athletic ability thus far, always falling when she runs too fast, and her coordination is lacking, so maybe the Trainers will take that into consideration? Not just the fact that she's the child of two Victors? They fake smiles and nod in unison and make the appropriate sounds of awe as Bay describes her day in her stilted not-quite baby talk, but inside they're dying.

The next day, Cato's tense and punches every wall in their bedroom, and Clove stays in the basement, sending knives into the walls ferociously because she can't be there to trip her daughter and save her from the life her mother thrust her into.

Bay comes home bruised, and her knees are scraped, and her face holds the defeat that her mother and father crave so dearly, and, as a five year old, she can't understand why Momma and Daddy start grinning and singing and dancing when she tells them that she didn't win the competition, but they look so happy that she joins in, and they dance around the kitchen and have cake for dinner because Bay asks to, and it's by far their happiest day.

**...**

She's not a Career, but soon enough the world claims her as its own, by way of first grade history class.

Bay comes home with old eyes and a new distrust of her parents that hadn't been there the day before, and Clove has this sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach because god-fucking-dammit, this is how their world is supposed to end, isn't it?

**...**

When Bay's seven, she sees the tape from the Games for the first time. Her grandmother is watching her that weekend, because her parents had to go the Capitol for some important meeting or something, and she watches it quietly, this feeling of _wrong_ settling over her because there's no way that the man that just ran a sword through a little boy is the same one that plays with her out in the yard behind their house and lets her sit in his lap while they watch old movies, and the woman that slits the throat of a curly-haired girl under the cover of night can't possibly be the same one that plays dolls with her and makes her lunches and kisses her forehead when she tucks her in at night, right?

They can't be, but they are, and she recognizes the graceful way her mother moves in the way that the girl on screen carves her victims, and she sees her father's gentle strength multiplied and demonized in the way that the boy breaks the neck of the big, dark boy from Eleven, and it's all a bit much for a girl who still believes that her parents hung the sun and the moon and the stars just for her, and when they come home, she doesn't let them hug her.

**...**

Cato watches as his daughter stops loving him, and it hurts like a bitch, and he sort of thinks that he should have expected it, because there's only so long you can keep secrets locked away, out of reach, but it still feels like karma has reached her cold hand into his chest and has his heart in her grip, and is twisting, twisting, twisting, until it feels like he can't breathe anymore.

He always thought that if he could make it through the Games, if he and Clove could come home to their daughter, everything would be okay, but it seems like he was wrong, and he starts to wonder if that had ever been a possibility to begin with.

**...**

Sometimes Clove sneaks into Bay's room as she sleeps, because that's the only time Bay isn't looking at her with distrust and thinly veiled terror. She'll lean against the frame of the door, letting the dim light of the hallway spill across the floor and cast a little light on her daughter's peaceful face.

She's so innocent still, so sweet, and Clove shudders to think what might be happening in her head right now, what nightmares she might be having, all because her parents are monsters that aren't very good at protecting her.

**...**

Years pass.

Cato and Clove do a pretty damn good job at hiding what they do in the Capitol, on their monthly trips into the city, and Bay never questions it, never questions the bruises that appear on her mother's arms, or the perfume her father smells of (here's a hint; her mother doesn't wear perfume).

Bay doesn't forget about what she's seen–she'll never forget–but she comes to terms with what her parents did, because the need she has for them to be near is something so primal, something so natural and strong and savage, that she'll never be able to cut herself off from them, in the same way that she'll never be able to cut her heart out of her chest or her lungs from within her ribcage.

She starts walking in step with her mother when they go grocery shopping, twining her fingers with her mother's cool, slim ones, and she starts hugging her father 'round his neck when he sits in the kitchen in the mornings, the paper in front of him and a cup of coffee beside him that she steals a sip from afterwards.

She starts kissing them on the cheek before bed, and telling them she loves them as she runs out the door for school, and the final thing, the moment that she thinks they breathe a sigh of relief because they know then that it'll all be okay; she starts falling asleep in front of them, starts turning her back on them, starts being unguarded around them again, trusting that they are her parents and that they love her and that they are not the people she saw in those tapes, not anymore.

She starts separating the monster from the person, the past from the present, starts filing these memories away into neat boxes in her mind, _then _and _now_, and she stops wishing that they weren't a part of her and that she wasn't a part of them.

**...**

When Bay is twelve years old, it is her first Reaping.

She watches two Careers step forward and volunteer before anyone else's name can be called, and she thinks she finally understands her parents, because the younger Career, the boy, he's shaking when he walks up.

**...**

When she turns thirteen, she kills something.

A rabbit that spooks her in the backyard, and she throws a spade in the direction of the noise, and hears a squeal, and cries when the red stains its fur. Her mother finds her there, cradling the animal, broken and bleeding, in her arms, ruining her dress, and she sees the spade lying next to her, tipped with red, and she hears her daughter murmuring over and over again, "_I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry_," and puts it together, the realization making her sick to her stomach.

Cato helps Bay bury it under the window of her bedroom, and Clove buys a new spade.

**...**

Bay never mentions it, but there was an odd sense of pride that had rushed through her, leaving as quickly as it had come. She figures it's in her genes.

**...**

Fourteen comes and goes quietly, and Bay starts attracting attention from the boys and some of the girls of Two, all of her mother's dark looks and a good portion of her father's mother's curves, and her smile is blinding, all that her father's smile could have been and would have been.

Cato goes on the offensive, and scares potential dates away relentlessly. Clove takes a simpler approach, and arranges for birth control from the Capitol for her daughter. Bay never mentions it, but she squeezes her mother's hand under the table at breakfast, the day after the package arrives.

**...**

The next Reaping, when Bay's fifteen, her name is called, and the Career that was supposed to step forward is nowhere to be found.

No one quite knows what to do.

**...**

She's never had any training, but her aim is deadly, she soon learns. She's not too bad with a sword, either, she notes happily, decapitating a dummy in the training rooms in the Capitol.

Her mother is a mentor, her father as well, as a special form of torture from the president himself, she knows. It's never been quite this clear before, but she knows that President Snow has always hated their family, for winning his Game, for her parents coming home together, but this is a bit much, isn't it?

The best she can do, however, is train and practice and scare the shit out of her competitors. Her District partner is a big Career, named Calcius, whose hand engulfed hers when they shook on stage for the cameras. He doesn't mind her much, too busy ripping things apart with his bare hands.

The partners from Twelve are fearsome; ever since the 74th, since her parents, since Twelve lost their Girl on Fire and their Bread Boy, they've put effort in training volunteers, in making them competitors. Tall and broad, they're siblings, she thinks.

Since the Capitol installed the rule that two may live, from the same District, to quell rebellion, more and more siblings have gone in, parents gambling everything in the hopes of winning it all. They rarely do.

There's a boy from Eight that stares at her constantly, though, eyes clouded and bright and empty and so full of life, all at the same time, it scares her. He's good-looking, not like the shining male specimen from District One, or the brawny, rugged man-boy from Four, but he's got a happy face, a happy smile, too happy for this, she thinks.

But at the same time, she realizes, walking past a mirror after scoring well in the talent round, she's got the same smile. Maybe, she thinks darkly, they'll die together, the happy children.

**...**

She's fifteen, and if she's going to die, she damn well won't be dying a virgin. The boys' eyes stay on her as she trains, muscles moving fluidly beneath smooth skin, and she hasn't been training long enough to lose her curves, not yet, anyway, so it's not hard to seduce one.

The boy from Four is surprisingly gentle with her, until she screams for him, screams _faster_ and _harder_ and other commands that are lost in his searing kiss. He slams into her hard enough that she knows she'll bruise.

The first time isn't as rewarding as she wished it would be, but then again, they have the whole night to practice, to give her this one thing before she dies. Her parents don't look at her when she makes her way back into the floor assigned to District Two.

It's only the next day that she realizes she never learned his name.

**...**

The boy from Eight, the one that watches her, is named Forte. He's a sweet boy, she thinks, if a little big-headed. He's obviously had girls falling over themselves for him, for years, she guesses, and the way he flirts with all the other girls sort of annoys her.

Not that she has reason to be annoyed.

She's never talked to him before. She's barely even noticed him, she convinces herself. It doesn't stop her from watching him as he walks away, staring long after he's gone.

**...**

She doesn't get an extra goodbye with her parents. The country boos.

**...**

The first day, she kills four people, including the one that unmade her, whatever his name was. His rugged head rolls away in the grass, making squishing sounds that roll her stomach, and she can't eat that night, too busy dry heaving somewhere in the woods.

It's different, killing a rabbit and decapitating dummies in training, but this was a boy, one that had a beating heart and that had cried and sweat and bled, and that just a few nights before had rolled off of her and fallen asleep so quickly, vulnerable to her in sleep, so stupid, she thinks, so very, very stupid.

He was stupid in the very end, turning his back on her and her sword, and shit, she's effectively blown her Career pack alliance out of the water, hasn't she?

**...**

She spends her night in the hollowed out belly of a fallen tree, sword beside her, fingers closing loosely around the handle, a knife in her other hand, lain across her stomach, and she doesn't sleep well, not at all.

The faces of the dead light up the night sky, and she wonders who the fuck came up with that symbolic shit.

**...**

The boy from Eight stumbles upon her as dawn breaks, and she's up in a second, weapons drawn, and he's armed too, armed to the teeth. With the light behind him, he looks like some type of twisted angel, his face classic and beautiful and she sort of wonders if love at first is something that girls like her are allowed, and she also sort of wishes it was, because damn, who better to love than him?

He lays his weapons down carefully, and holds his hands up to give in, and she wants to ask him why he would do that, why he would give her the option of killing him, with no resistance, but instead, she lays her weapons down as well.

**...**

He's gentle with her, his hands coming up to cup her face as he thrusts into her, moving slowly to draw it out, what could be their last night.

She learns his name is Forte Aster, and that her mother killed his sister.

She learns that his favorite color is gray and that he has this spot just under his ear that makes him moan when it's kissed, and that he wanted to be a doctor, not a factory worker like everyone else in his District (textile, she thinks, and she wonders how often she's dreamt about be something other than a mason's wife (too often to be happy)).

She learns that he's one of ten children, the youngest, and that he thought he was in love with this girl that lived next door to him, but that he really isn't. She asks him later, why he doesn't love that girl.

He doesn't say anything.

Just looks at her, eyes wide and bright with the false starlight.

**...**

They form their own alliance of sorts, and alliance of hipbones and secrets and kisses, hot in the dead of night.

They don't talk much of the future, don't even talk past the next hour, but they keep their weapons too far away to reach quickly, and that's enough.

**...**

Bay assumes that someone finally caught them on camera, broadcasted their tryst across the nation, because she gets a parachute with a note that has her mother's handwriting on it, saying _run_ and she can practically feel the anger rolling off of it, but doesn't her mother get it? Doesn't she know what it's like to want to live as much as you can before you might die?

Bay wants to feel everything, wants to love and cry and lose and laugh and be _happy_, as happy as she used to be, before she found out her parents were murderers and _no_, she's never fucking gotten over that, much as she tries to pretend.

So, she does that thing (you know the thing–three fingers to her lips, and then up to the sky? She evens whistles the tune that the girl from Twelve and the little one from Eleven used in the 74th Games).

And the fire rains down from the heavens, and she laughs as Forte drags her through the forest, because she always thought hell would be after death, and well, maybe it's not quite hell, but it's the apocalypse for sure, and wasn't that supposed to have happened a long, long time ago, before Panem and before broken children and before _Games_?

**...**

By some miracle, they don't die in flames. They come out of it singed and smelling of smoke and sweat, but alive. However, they also are in the center of a very open, very vulnerable field, and they realize, at about the same time, that the only way either of them is going to live is if they split up _now_– so they do, with a fleeting kiss pressed to grieving lips.

**...**

They don't know it yet, but that final act of might-be-love is enough to send the nation over the edge. People that remembered the tributes from Twelve remember it well, and find it funny that the cracked star-crossed lovers' daughter has a more compelling tragedy being written for her, and her parents bite their lips and grip each other's hands too tightly, and the people stir.

And a man, a man that makes a mockery of a lion, sits on a throne of death and narrows his eyes.

**...**

It ends a little like this; Bay is starving and cold and tired and a little more than desperate, and when she finds herself facing her district partner with his knife to Forte's throat on a food hunt, she doesn't stop to think, just sort of throws the dagger she stole from one of her victims and it buries itself in his head and his blood pours out sluggishly at first and then fluidly, and it coats Forte, dyes his tawny hair russet, but he's _alive_.

She stumbles forward, overwhelmed with what she's just done because if she'd aimed lower, at Forte, she'd have been able to go home, and so would have Calcius, and that'd have been one less death, but now it's between her and her boy, and she knows she can't kill him, and he can't kill her, and she also knows that he's not quite as desperate to be free as to die, so she lunges for the dagger, intent on slicing her own porcelain throat open before he can stop her, but Forte's eyes widen and he yanks it out of Calcius's forehead just as she reaches it, and she narrows her eyes.

"I'll find a way to kill myself," she promises, voice low, eyes dark and full of an emotion she'd never be able to place, but they match Forte's eyes, she knows.

He sighs, "I know. But let's not let it be on my account, sweetheart."

The fact that he can sound arrogant and concerned at the same time ought to irritate her more than it does, but she chokes out a laugh.

He pulls her to him, dagger falling down into the bloody grass, and he kisses her then, so sweet and full of emotion, she can practically taste the grief, and she has to shove him away, or else the Hunger Games will turn into a porno in approximately ten seconds, and she says bitterly, "Stop it, _stop_ making me feel like this. One of us has to die."

"Why not both live? We'll make our own rules this time," he says, mouth lilting up into a half smile, a dimple almost showing in his cheek, and Bay slips a hand into her pocket. She had heard before that eating nightlock was like falling asleep.

**...**

It's been hard for Clove to watch her daughter fall in love on a television screen, in a place where that love will have to die, and she wants to badly to shake her, to tell her that she's making a mistake, to _save _her, but the best she can do is avert her eyes when the Capitol gets a camera on Bay and the boy from Eight, and she stops listening when her daughter cries out his name and _jesus christ _is this really necessary?

Cato flees the room whenever the cameras find Bay and the Eight boy, but Clove can't, because that's like turning her back on her daughter, and she can't do that, _ever_.

She overhears a conversation between the Game Maker and one of his cronies, about sending the lovers running, and it's all too similar to their Games, isn't it? So she writes out a note, and sends it off in a parachute, and she prays to a god she's never believed in that her daughter will get it and not become the next girl-on-fire.

It works. Her daughter's heart breaks, and Clove closes her eyes to Bay's tears, broadcasted throughout the country.

**...**

Cato wants to break that boy, that _Forte Aster_, wants to tell him to get the fuck away from his kid, wants to ask him who the fuck he thinks he is, toying with her emotions like that, when he knows that one of them will have to die.

He has to leave the room, every time they come onscreen, which is a _lot_, by the way, and he feels Clove's eyes on his back as he storms out, and how the hell can she stand to stay there?

And he wants his daughter home, next to him, where he can keep her safe, wants to be able to hold her so badly that he can feel tears building, can feel the emotion gathering in his throat in a hard ball, choking him, but he can't even think about what she'll be like after this, if she'll be like him, like Clove, and that is more terrifying than anything else, he thinks.

**...**

Days pass, and Bay stays out of the way, and lets the survivors duke it out without her, and her parents swell with pride because they taught her that, taught her to identify her strengths and other people's weaknesses, and to let people destroy themselves, and it's nice to not see her have to kill, so, yeah, they're happy.

They're happy up until she walks in on Calcius, their other tribute, seconds away from cutting the throat of her boy from Eight, and they're mostly happy up until her knife buries itself in Calcius's forehead, and up until she kisses her boy they still have hope, but then they know– their daughter is not coming home.

She loves that boy, and Clove grips her husband's hand (she realizes for a moment that they've never made it official, just adopted the titles– oh, jesus, is that really relevant now?), holds it tight until their fingers turn white in fear, and Cato breaks a glass accidently, and the shards pierce his skin, but he barely notices.

The room gets quite quiet, everyone trying to hear what the two children onscreen are saying, and Clove wants to _scream_, she wants to give her daughter this one moment of privacy, the best she can do from here and all of these vultures are staring at the screen with wide, unblinking eyes. Cato's blood drips onto the floor, and Clove's head pounds, and her heart constricts as Bay's hand inches away from Eight's and towards her pocket instead, and she runs through the list of things that could be in that pocket in her head, and then it hits her.

_Nightlock_.

Shit.

_Shit_.

And then it's all slow motion, and Bay's bringing the berries up to her mouth just to have her hand knocked away by Eight, and he's screaming at her, calling her an idiot and doesn't she know that there are people willing to die for her? Doesn't she know that she's _important_?

Clove sees the change in Bay's face, and her heart breaks because how could she not have known that? How could she have let her daughter go through life thinking that she's not important? Eight– no, Forte, because he saved her daughter, he deserves his own name– Forte stamps his foot on the berries, a final act of defiance, and Bay stares at him, eyes wide and angry and bitter and _can't somebody just end it already_?

Bay lunges for the knife in Calcius's hand, but Forte's there already, blocking her, and he grabs her shoulders and tells her to stop.

"_I can't kill you_," Bay cries, her face pale and her lips turning blue. How cold are they making that arena?

Cato whispers suddenly, bluntly, "They're going to freeze them."

**...**

It's getting colder, Bay realizes, standing there in front of Forte, so angry she wants to hit him, but she won't, because she's afraid that if she touches him, she'll never stop.

Forte's eyes grow dark and he says quietly, ignoring her desperate plea, "You're going to freeze."

"No," she stammers, teeth already beginning to chatter in cold defiance. "I won't."

He shrugs off his coat and tosses it around her shoulders, saying as he does so, "You're smaller than me. You'll be dead in an hour."

Her mind works quickly. An hour? More than enough time. "I want to show you something," Bay says quietly, tugging the coat tighter around her. "If one of us has to die, than let's die with this."

Forte doesn't say anything, but he takes her hand and lets her led him through the forest.

She'd found a waterfall, on one of her days spent alone, and it was beautiful, she'd thought, too beautiful for only one person to see. Now it'll serve two purposes.

The water runs freely still, though there's snow around the edge, and Bay sort of wishes that they'd have met under different circumstances. No. She really wishes that they'd met under different circumstances.

"It's beautiful," he breathes.

He's standing right behind her now, his breath hot against her neck, and his arms are coming up to encircle her, to keep her warm, so she spins to face him. She thinks she's surprised him, for a moment, at least, and he gives her a half-smile.

She leans up to kiss him, then, and in that split second that he's completely distracted, she twists them off the ledge.

**...**

They fall for what seems like an eternity, Clove thinks, caught between closing her eyes and staring straight at the screen, and she almost screams when Bay starts to twist them mid-air, positioning them so that she's on the bottom, so that she'll take the major impact, when they hit the water.

They're still kissing when their descent ends.

A hush falls over the room, because no one's quite sure what's to happen now.

Everyone must have assumed that the Capitol would have intervened before they both died.

Cato and Clove are frozen. The child that they fought their way home for was dead. The screen cuts to black. Over loudspeakers, against a blank screen, a disembodied voice says, "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please excuse the interruption."

**...**

They get a pine coffin that's been nailed shut.

The escort, a little chipper thing with evergreen hair, says brightly, "The rocks at the bottom disfigured her face. It's better this way."

And Clove wants to rip her apart, bit by bit, and watch her bleed, because the only way that anything would be _better_ is if her daughter wasn't dead.

**...**

When Bay wakes up, she's in a very bright room—not falling, she might add—and Forte's nowhere in sight, and his hand is not in hers, and she's got needles in her arms and doctors surrounding her, and she really just wants her parents, wants her mama to hold her and her daddy to protect her, like any little girl would.

And then there's that thought.

That black, terrible thought that weighs on her chest and makes it hard to breathe again.

The grief comes fast and hard, and she starts to wonder how they did it, how they kept her alive and killed him, because she made damn sure that she hit the water first, and jesus christ shouldn't she be dead? Didn't she read somewhere that hitting water from a great height was like falling face first onto cement, and shouldn't she be a Bay Fervor-pancake right about now?

She's not sure how much time passes, just that it does, and no one ever talks to her, but later (how much later, she'll never be able to tell you; just…later), a doctor comes up to her and starts blathering on about extensive damage and other words she doesn't understand.

Finally, he tells her, "You, missy, are in quite a lot of trouble."

She doesn't believe him.

**...**

She really ought to.

**...**

She finds out later that the Capitol cut off the footage when they hit the water, and that they only really showed her afterwards, being brought up in the helicraft.

She finds out later that they fished two bodies out of the water, and that Forte was alive and kicking at that time, and that it was her that was clinging to the scrap of life left in her, chest barely rising and falling with every shallow breath.

She finds out later that no one knows she's alive, actually, and that Forte is the crowned Victor. The relief is instantaneous, and she wishes she could tell him that she's okay as well, but just knowing that he made it out of that arena is enough to tame her for a while.

She find out later that the President is biding his time and waiting for the right moment to unveil her, like a prized addition to his collection. A butterfly, pinned to the wall. A dog in a cage. A lightning bug in a jar. She dislikes the feeling.

She finds out later that her parents are planning her funeral.

**...**

The day-to-day is the hardest, Clove finds. Obviously the bigger picture—she's no longer a mother—is horrible and daunting and excruciating, but it's when she gets up in the morning and starts making the blackberry pancakes Bay loves—loved—that it hits her hardest.

When she has to correct her verbs, she cries, so she sort of stops talking, tries to stop thinking about Bay.

She and Cato hardly speak anymore, and he's taken to sleeping in the basement, and so she starts sleeping on the floor of her daughter's room, too scared to sleep in the bed because then it'll stop smelling like her.

Their lives turn into nothing but a collection of empty days, and it's not like they even have jobs to distract themselves with. The house is a shrine to their dead child, nothing of hers moved since she left for the Games. It's sick, but it's all that keeps her going these days, the knowledge that when she walks downstairs it'll look like Bay's just come home from school, her bag dropped carelessly on the couch and her shoes in a haphazard pile by the door—Clove grimaces when she remembers that she kept harping on Bay to take them to her room.

She stops buying blackberries at the market.

**...**

He keeps a box of Bay's old baby things down in the basement, where he spends most of his time. It hadn't been intentional, he'd honestly meant to not withdraw, meant to be there for Clove, but when the only good, pure thing in your life is gone, it's hard to even wake up in the mornings, let alone be around someone who looks _just like them_.

So he sleeps in the basement, and he tells himself that it's because Clove snores, and not because she cries herself to sleep and that he's too big of a coward to hold her.

He punches walls and breaks things and rips all the Games memorabilia to pieces, and he falls to his knees and screams when he sees the nicks in the wall from where Bay tried to learn how to throw knives when she was nine.

The damage he once lectured her about, telling her that she needs to throw them at the target, even when she insisted that the wood made a better sound—well, damage has never been so welcome.

**...**

The right moment comes sooner than anyone anticipated. Bay had been living in the infirmary of the President's mansion, and it hadn't been half bad—three square meals a day and all the books she wanted, whenever she wanted.

She could almost forget that she hadn't seen the sun in weeks, hadn't felt the wind in her hair, or grass under her feet.

But, when Forte, finally recovered from his impromptu swim, limps onto Caesar Flickerman's stage, feet dragging, eyes heavy, and hair coiffed perfectly in a way that makes her sick, the country stamps their feet and screams.

**...**

The President unveils her on live television, in front of a crowd.

It's all perfectly coordinated—no room for error, no time to jump—and she's been poked at and prodded by a team of stylists and now her ebony curls are smooth and someone did her makeup and she can't help but feel weird with lipstick on.

Caesar Flickerman, still alive somehow, though his age is starting to show, introduces her as a special guest, and the crowd falls silent. She moves lightly, fluidly, and all but dances onto the stage.

There's a collective gasp, and then screams and the crowd is cheering and whooping and stamping their feet and clapping their hands and Caesar Flickerman hugs her, and she works hard to play the part of the repentant sinner, the grateful saved.

There are interviews, and she throws bones to the audience and casts glowing praise on the President, keeping her tone warm and words sincere. She's always been a good actress, she thinks, but this is just ridiculously good.

She makes a note to congratulate herself later.

**...**

The TV turns on of its own accord, and Panem's seal flashes while a disembodied voice comes over, "A special broadcast from your government."

The lights come up on Caesar Flickerman's stage, and Cato must hear the noise because he appears at the top of the stairs, bags under his eyes and hair dusty. He looks bad, she thinks, but so does she.

Running a hand through her tangled hair self-consciously, Clove rounds the corner of the kitchen at the moment that Flickerman introduces a 'special guest', and she rolls her eyes slightly at this—isn't that what he calls everyone?

But then someone with distinctly familiar eyes dances out, almost floating she walks so lightly, and Clove drops to her knees. Because her _daughter_, the daughter she _buried_ not a month earlier, is there, breathing and smiling beatifically and talking, her voice animated and bubbly and everything that Clove had started to forget, and god_—how could she forget_?

It's over quickly, too quickly, or maybe that's just how it feels to a grieving mother, but the next thing she knows, Bay's lead off stage by someone Clove recognizes as a handler, whose hand strays too low on Bay's back to be comfortable.

Cato punches a wall when the TV goes black, snapping off the same way it had turned on.

Their home has never been more quiet.

**...**

People protest more, since she's been unveiled, she thinks, watching the television in the corner of the room. Four is on fire, but then again so is Eight and so is Eleven, and so, really, what's one more district, when they'll all burn eventually?

Her handler hovers around her a lot, so she doesn't get to spend too much time in front of the television. He keeps a hand on her shoulder, most of the time, or on her elbow or waist or thigh and one time she swore it was on her breast, but she was probably strung out on morphling, the steady supply kept up for the residual pain from her fall.

She doesn't see many people anymore, and the President, she think, is content to keep her locked away again, until she rots. It's been maybe three weeks since, or three months past, who the hell knows anymore.

She used to bother to mark her days, but at some point, when she realized she would probably never see her parents again, would never see Forte, she stopped caring.

She finds out that there's stirrings of rebellion in Two, in Five, in Six—she thinks that maybe she started this, but she also thinks that she's just sparking the kindling, and she can't really have it both ways, can she?

**...**

Match or flame, she can't decide.

**...**

Luckily, it's not much up to her.

**...**

In the end, she's the flame, and flames must be extinguished.

**...**

Forte is living in Eight, in Victor's Village, with his own room for the first time in seventeen years, and he's okay, really, he is—it's not like he wakes up in a cold sweat, dreaming about a dead girl, not like he starts crying at inconvenient times, just because suddenly the grief—the guilt is so suffocating he feels like he's dying.

He's okay, honest.

He's okay when the television switches on, and he's okay when Caesar Flickerman introduces a special guest and he's still okay when the curtain begins to move.

But when the guest steps out of the shadows, he stumbles, and maybe he's not so okay, actually, because he vomits on the carpet, and he remembers seeing her face, coming out of the water, seeing her twisted body and the blood, jesus, the blood, it's what keeps him up at night.

Bay dances onto the stage, hugging Flickerman lightly and smiling at the stunned crowd.

She looks good.

She looks _alive._

Forte's mother finds him on the floor of his kitchen, and there's blood on his wrists and she panics, because, jesus christ no she's not losing another child, but it's just the cuts on his knuckles from punching the walls, just the blood oozing down.

He can't bring himself to say anything—what could he say? _The girl that died for me didn't die_, that's what he could say, but he's not even sure if he can believe it, not until she's in front of him, not until he can reach out and touch her, feel her skin beneath his fingers, her ebony hair on his cheek.

Knowing Snow—that will never happen. Or worse yet, it will.

**...**

He lights the first match in Eight, torching the Justice Building. There might still be Peacekeepers inside, there might not be. He doesn't know.

What he does know is that it has been one hundred and forty two days since he last saw Bay, and he knows what it's like to love someone so much that you can't breathe without them and he knows what it's like to watch someone die. He doesn't think much of it.

Eight burns throughout the night, and Forte stays awake, stays alert, waiting with the rest of the slap-dash militia, waiting for the Capitol to storm, guns drawn and bombs away.

Children and women and the old and sick are ushered into the backwoods, hidden away in hastily constructed bomb shelters, gas masks on in the hopes that they'll survive. His mother begged him to go—his father and brothers were going under, she'd told him, as if it would convince him to stay with the family.

He didn't tell her, because he worried it would break her fully, but he wants to die. Rather die a martyr than live as a traitor.

When dawn breaks, so does the calm—the fires had burned out a while ago, and it was silent when they heard the _hrum_ of a helicraft engine, close and closer still to their home.

There are two hundred men and women here, some married, others single, some parents, others little more than children themselves.

There's a pair of lovers that sit next to each other, fingers wrapped so tightly together he can't tell where one ends and the other begins. The girl is crying, the boy is staring ahead. He thinks he knows that they all will die. An old man clings to his wife's wedding ring, on a chain around his neck.

And here Forte is, mourning a sister he never knew and fighting for a girl he knew all too well, looking young and childish with a gun in his hands.

Things were never meant to end this way, he thinks.

**...**

"Ready?" There's grim determination in her husband's eyes, Clove sees, nodding jerkily.

Two's rioting in the town square. Houses burn, babies scream. Their daughter is somewhere they're not, and that's not how the world should be. Peacekeepers keep shooting into the crowd, and they're spattered with blood, and, god, doesn't this bring back memories?

She's back in form, throwing knives with deadly accuracy, and she thinks that this will be her last stand, but the melee is broken by the unmistakable sound of the town's big screen whirring to life. An image appears, grainy and shaky, but eventually it steadies and focuses, and Clove drops her knives.

Her daughter is chained to a chair in the center of the shot, a bag over her head, but Clove recognizes the hair, matted and grimy, and the hands clenched on the arms, small and pale, clenched so tight she can see every tendon standing out on its own.

Snow's voice comes over the speakers, ghostly and disembodied. "Stand down," he booms. "Stand down and she'll return to you. Continue in your misguided attempt, and I will have no choice but to send her back in pieces."

Bay jerks back, rocking the chair a little in the motion.

"In the case that you…ah…choose to believe that I carry more mercy in my heart than is absolutely true…"

A man—a Peacekeeper walks into the shot, baton at the ready. He brings it down hard on Bay's wrist. Cato flinches when they hear the crack. Bay doesn't scream, just makes a strangled noise at the back of her throat, and Clove thinks that maybe she's clenching her mouth shut, maybe her jaw locked into place like it used to sometimes when she was a baby and—.

Snow comes back on, murmuring, "She's young—sweet and naïve. Does she deserve such evils thrust upon her?"

The baton is drawn back again. Clove averts her eyes this time, but hears the crack of bones. Ribs, maybe. Bay lets loose a strangled laugh, and she wonders if she's snapped. The soft, dull sound of flesh hitting flesh and bone.

Clove looks up and Bay's jaw is red and she spits out blood at the Peacekeeper. He backhands her again, harder this time—holds her head in place as he punches her. It's not long before there's blood spattered all over her face, his fist, his clothes, her clothes.

There's no movement for a moment. The Peacekeeper seems to get new instructions, and all Clove can see of his is his mouth, and the way it curls into a smile and her stomach inverts, and there's ice in her veins, lead in her mouth where her tongue should be.

The baton clatters to the floor, and the man—the monster shifts, his stance becoming predatory, and he stalks towards Bay. His hand comes up to cup her cheek, his other drifting to her shoulder, easing the fabric of her shirt away.

Her skin is mottled with bruises, from what Clove can see and she feels like she's going to vomit.

She drops her knives, Cato his gun. She hears the crash and clatter of weapons falling around them, but her eyes are glued to the screen. This can't be broadcasted everywhere. It can't be. Some lines should never be crossed. And then the footage is cut, and no one has weapons and people start dropping like flies again and nothing matters anymore.

**...**

No one tells you this about war—the worst atrocities are committed in bedrooms, in jail cells, not on battlefields. Bay is bruised and bloody in places that a fifteen year old need not be bruised and bloodied.

Her former handler is the most frequent, and the most vicious. He tears at her skin like she's made of paper, and maybe she is.

A revolution rages on outside her cell, and a war inside.

**...**

Let there be one lesson learned from the violence that ensues. A highly motivated mother is a very dangerous mother.

**...**

Clove delivers the final blow against the Capitol. President Snow dies with a knife in his throat, and her voice in his ears, murmuring quiet threats against his family as she tears him apart.

It's a coup d'état of the bloodiest persuasion, but when the dust has settled, the new government has ascended and Bay is still missing. The President's palace is infinite, with sprawling tunnels under the building leading to medical centers and dead ends.

It takes a full seventeen hours to find the crumpled up little girl that Clove recognizes through the blood and dirt.

Bay bites the first person to come near her, and the second, and anyone that is not her mother, really.

No one blames her.

**...**

Here's how it ends: Bay grows up broken anyway. Her parents try hard as they can to make things easier for her, but when you're a political hostage for months—well, things take a toll.

She takes up drinking a few weeks after she comes home and refuses to talk to the doctor that her parents pay to check in on her every day. When she's eighteen, she gets an apartment above a bar and one day she sees Forte Aster downstairs and catches his eye for a moment.

Maybe under different circumstances, they would rush into each other's arms, crying and kissing and making up for lost time.

But Bay has shattered glass where her heart once was and barbed wire between her legs and Forte's body is seventy percent scar tissue, thirty percent hatred, and they were never really expecting a happy ending anyway.

**...**

Twenty years down line, Bay ends up with a live-in boyfriend and a daughter that smiles enough to draw her mother out of the dark. Forte marries the girl next door, has a handful of kids with his hair and his wife's eyes.

Neither look back.

**...**

When they're blood behind your eyelids, maybe it's better that way.

**...**

* * *

**so. been quite some time, my friends, and for that i apologize. i also apologize for the hot mess that you just read. to be fair, i was drunk for most of it. aaaaaannnnnnyyyyyway, review?**


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